who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
@howl-bot.bsky.social
Posting the whole of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, one line every three hours. Inspired by @HowlTweeter which ran on Twitter from 2010 to 2023. Dedicated to Carl Solomon. A bot by Hex (@hex.ooo)
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,